Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Civilisation, like life itself, has always been about capturing energy. That is to say, just as a successful species is one that converts the sun’s energy into offspring more rapidly than another species, so the same is true of a nation. Progressively, as the aeons passed, life as a whole has grown gradually more and more efficient at doing this, at locally cheating the second law of thermodynamics. The plants and animals that dominate the earth today channel more of the sun’s energy thro...

After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his neighborhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of the heaven were of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon me. I was still traveling, and traveling so fast that light itself was not wholly indifferent to my passage. The overtaking undulations took long to catch me. They therefore affected me as slower pulsations than they normally were, and I saw them therefore as red. Those that met me on my hea...

Our earth has orbital motion, revolving once around the sun in about 365 days. Suppose that this orbital motion suddenly stopped completely, but everything else remained the same. How long would it take for the earth to plunge along a straight line into the sun?
[...]
Kepler's law applies to planetary orbits, whether they be of circular, or elliptical shape. It says that T22/T12 = R23/R13, where T is the period of an orbit and R is its semi-major axis. The semi-major axis is the average...

If a teacher is a gardener, than a student is the seed. The classroom serves as the greenhouse creating a warm, safe environment for growth. An administrator is the soil, serving as a strong nutrient base for the seed to root. The parents are the water, providing live and maintaining it. When the water/parent is not plentiful, the seed will suffer. The curriculum is the sun. It shines knowledge to ensure growth. The aspects of the curriculum that some students do not make sense of can be cons...

It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons
of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment
and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it
supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out
dangerous radiation, even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there
were short-wave ...

How should a living organism live?
When spring arrives, you open your doors, the wind blows in. The smell of flowers fills the airand colors come back to lifeSometimes when it rains or when it’s foggy out. You can’t help but breathe the air deep into your lungs and experience the feeling of small water droplets filling them up. Both piercingly cold but also pure and fresh.
In autumn, you would spend a whole afternoon with a loved one doing absolutely nothing, basking lazily in the sun....

But why should comets become more likely to hit us every million years?
Here we launch ourselves into deep speculation. It has been suggested
that the sun has a sister star, and the two orbit each other with a
periodicity of about 26 million years. This hypothetical binary partner,
which has never been seen but which has nevertheless been given the
dramatic name Nemesis, passes, once per orbital rotation, through the
so-called Oort Cloud, the belt of perhaps a trillion comets which orbits
the...

The spectrum depends upon light of different colours being slowed by
different amounts: the refractive index of a given substance, say glass or
water, is greater for blue light than for red. You could think of blue light
as being a slower swimmer than red, getting tangled up in the
undergrowth of atoms in glass or water because of its short wavelength.
Light of all colours gets less tangled up among the sparser atoms of air,
but blue still travels more slowly than red. In a vacuum, where ther...

The numerical results of my calculations show that the quantities of energy required for permanent survival and communication are surprisingly modest. For a society with the same complexity as the present human society on Earth, starting from the present time and continuing forever, the total reserve of energy required is about equal to the energy now radiated by the Sun in eight hours. The total energy reserve contained in the Sun would be sufficient to support forever a society with a compl...